General Magic
Until yesterday, I was entirely unfamiliar with the history of General Magic:
“Chances are that you’ve never heard of General Magic, but in Silicon Valley, the company is the stuff of legend. Magic spun out of Apple in 1990 with much of the original Mac team on board and a bold new product idea: a handheld gadget that they called a ‘personal communicator.’ Plugged into a telephone jack, it could handle e-mail, dial phone numbers, and even send SMS-like instant messages — complete with emoji and stickers. It had an app store stocked with downloadable games, music, and programs that could do things like check stock prices and track your expenses. It could take photos with an (optional) camera attachment. There was even a prototype with a touch screen that could make cellular calls and wirelessly surf the then-embryonic web. In other words, General Magic pulled the technological equivalent of a working iPhone out of its proverbial hat — a decade before Apple started working on the real thing. Shortly thereafter, General Magic itself vanished.”
I came to learn of the company because I was reading Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom):
“A candid, colorful, and comprehensive oral history that reveals the secrets of Silicon Valley — from the origins of Apple and Atari to the present day clashes of Google and Facebook, and all the startups and disruptions that happened along the way. Rarely has one economy asserted itself as swiftly — and as aggressively — as the entity, we now know as Silicon Valley. Built with a seemingly permanent culture of reinvention, Silicon Valley does not fight change; it embraces it, and now powers the American economy and global innovation.”
The book was a stark contrast with what I had chosen to read right before… When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management:
“When it was founded in 1993, Long-Term was hailed as the most impressive hedge fund in history. But after four years in which the firm dazzled Wall Street as a $100 billion moneymaking juggernaut, it suddenly suffered catastrophic losses that jeopardized not only the biggest banks on Wall Street but the stability of the financial system itself. The dramatic story of Long-Term’s fall is now a chilling harbinger of the crisis that would strike all of Wall Street, from Lehman Brothers to AIG, a decade later. In his new Afterword, Lowenstein shows that LTCM’s implosion should be seen not as a one-off drama but as a template for market meltdowns in an age of instability — and as a wake-up call that Wall Street and government alike tragically ignored.”
Last night, I spent the evening listening to one of my alma mater’s best-known professors, Jeremy Siegel, give a presentation to alumni for an hour:
Professor Siegel has always had terrific stage presence and his ideas have generally remained consistent.
Unfortunately, the largely Wall Street audience found little inspiration in the basic tenets that any tried-and-trusted investor should hold dear.
After decades of working in finance, it seemed that too many had divorced their spirits from how capital and the future should work hand-in-hand.
Say what you will about tech events catered with pizza and beer, but at least it’s not a dead-end street for knowing how to live in the present while thinking about the magic of tomorrow.
To borrow a quote from the noir prophet writer William Gibson, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
